Haha, cool, that gave me a chuckle :)

“We'll be saying a big hello to all intelligent lifeforms everywhere and to everyone else out there, the secret is to bang the rocks together, guys.” - The Hitchhikers Guige to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams

Nice story.

But are you implying that we are somehow more evolved than the monkeys? Both the human and the monkey in the story have evolved for the same amount of time since our last common ancestor.

Without a magnetic field, isn’t the surface of Mars subject to sterilising radiation from Sol?

Belter, our future is in orbital habs. Going downwell is for tourism and archaeology.

It’s not worth doing because it is easier, but because all of our eggs are in one basket (planet). We know of disasters that can wipe out almost all life on a single planet. Of course, there are also disasters that can wipe out all life in one star system (and one region of the Galaxy). So, ideally we need to colonize many worlds in many different parts of the Galaxy, but baby steps. Step one is to have a sustainable population on multiple moons/planets/stations of this star system before we jump to other star systems.

I don't know. Have you seen humanity? I think teraforming another planet is probably easier than not fucking up this one

Vastly easier to not only stop but also undo all the damage here than to do anything of consequence on Mars.

The best way I heard this put: Before we worry about terraforming Mars, maybe first we should stop Venusforming Terra.

Can you walk and chew gum?

Username checks out.

I can not confirm this; the parent calculation is the correct one. I can't immediately find what your error was. (edit: It's your [km/s]—you wrote [m/s] by mistake).

    (let* ((ρ ([g (cm -3)] 5))
           (d ([km] 22))
           (m (* ρ (expt d 3)))
           (v ([km (s -1)] 90))
           (ke (* 1/2 m (expt v 2)))
           (kg-tnt ([J (kg -1)] 4.2e6)))
      (values (/ ke kg-tnt)
       (as [megaton] (/ ke kg-tnt))))
    
    5.133857142857142e19 [KG]
    5.133857142857143e10 [MEGATON]

Based on the corrected 90 km/s instead of m/s it should be 52 pt (peta-ton) impact.

1040 x more energy that the Tsar Bomba.

Or 5-ish Tsar Bomba per country on Earth.

Or 3466 Hiroshima nukes.

Or 17 Hiroshima nukes per country.

90 m/s?

Way too slow, it's more like 70km/s (or 90) - seems you left out a k.

It is of the same caliber as the dinosaur ending meteorite. The planet barely shrugged from it. There is suspicion that something the size of pluto has already hit mars once upon a time. And it is way more massive than this speck of cosmic dust.